Milestone highlights progress in mobile chips, age of current consoles

Share this story

The next generation of Nvidia mobile chips will be able to push more polygons than current high-end game consoles, according to Nvidia Senior VP of Content and Technology Tony Tamasi. Speaking to Bit-tech recently, Tamasi noted that "The PS3 and Xbox 360 are barely more powerful than mobile devices... the next click of mobile phones will outperform [them]."

To be fair, this probably says more about the age of the current HD game consoles than the power of Nvidia's upcoming mobile chips. The Xbox 360 and PS3 both have GPUs that can handle about 200 gigaFLOPS, which is not that much better than the 80 gigaFLOPS Nvidia is boasting for its current Tegra 4 mobile chips (yes, we know FLOPS aren't a perfect measure of processor performance, but they're close enough to highlight the power scales involved). Sony's PlayStation 4 will push the console space up to 1.8 teraFLOPS later this year, of course, and it will take mobile chips a while to catch up with the 4.5 teraFLOPS possible in Nvidia's current high-end Titan PC graphics cards.

Still, passing the mark set by current HD consoles has implications for the products that will be based on those Nvidia mobile chips. This level of performance has been the de facto standard for millions of console gamers for years now, and being able to pack that kind of processing power into a cheap, tiny form factor could change the market in some interesting ways. Imagine when next year's model of the Ouya or Nvidia's own Project Shield are able to run 3D games at the level of Gears of War: Judgment or Uncharted 3 without breaking a sweat, for instance.

Sure, there's nothing really new about Moore's Law packing more computing power into a smaller space at a cheaper price over time. But it can still be striking to note just how far we've come, and how what was considered high-end just a few years ago will soon be only passable in mobile phone performance. Of course, in ten years we'll all be running PlayStation 4 emulators on our holographic Googlezon Glass displays (powered by the Samsung Galaxy 14s in our pocket) and wonder why we were ever impressed by this kind of thing in the first place.

Share this story

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

As we approach the limits of diminishing returns (that is, each progressive console generation will be slightly less substantial as the previous one as we inch closer to photo realism), it seems logical that other computing devices will move quickly towards what consoles will be producing anyways. Sure, high performance PC's will always have the edge, but I feel like the difference between mobile devices and console will only grow smaller.

In a way it reminds me of how the arcades died, when the graphics capabilities of arcade machines couldn't effectively stay ahead of home consoles, and the appeal for arcades diminished.

Edit: Not to imply the death of consoles, they will always have their place. Just that they may not always have a substantial graphical edge over mobile devices.

Is this assuming their next gen mobile chips will have the same power draw or better than current gen? Power usage is probably a higher metric than graphical processing for a mobile device. With devices trying to be as thin and light as possible, you are not given a lot of battery to draw from.

Yeah, that's great and all, but I also don't run my PS3 off of a battery the size of a small deck of business cards. I don't really care if my next mobile phone or tablet can out class my PS3 in terms of processing power if doing so means I can't use it without having to charge it several times a day.

Until I read the comments, I was really confused by the headline. Mobile GPUs (IE, for mobile computers: Laptops) passed the 360/ps3 years ago.. like, technically, around 6 months after their initial releases.

Doing that in the <1W range is impressive.. and I'd expect that the ps4/xbox 720 (or whatever..) will be passed by mobile chips within 2 years of release, rather than 7.5. Mobile CPUs and GPUs are replaying the last 20-30 years of desktop/laptop technology advancement on fast-forward.

Typical Nvidia PR smoke and mirrors, good luck finding any game developers to actually put down the big money to make a AAA title on mobile.

Lili, for one, already makes damn impressive use of mobile graphics power. And even if we're not seeing console style games, it's not like indies aren't going to be able to benefit from the ability to push more polygons. And if we get to the point where we start seeing last gen (360/PS3) ports to mobile (which doesn't require anywhere near the budget of a new title) that would just be fantastic.

Nvidia lately have been going on the offensive with the launch of next generation consoles, Nvidia is out across all 3 major players so they are feeling butt hurt.

This! These are just the sour grapes of NVidia. I mean sure my smartphone will even probably outperform the PS4 in lets say 5 years, but then a high end smartphone costs $600-$800 (without sub) and the next gen consoles will have to be under $500 to succeed...

As we approach the limits of diminishing returns (that is, each progressive console generation will be slightly less substantial as the previous one as we inch closer to photo realism), it seems logical that other computing devices will move quickly towards what consoles will be producing anyways. Sure, high performance PC's will always have the edge, but I feel like the difference between mobile devices and console will only grow smaller.

In a way it reminds me of how the arcades died, when the graphics capabilities of arcade machines couldn't effectively stay ahead of home consoles, and the appeal for arcades diminished.

Edit: Not to imply the death of consoles, they will always have their place. Just that they may not always have a substantial graphical edge over mobile devices.

It looks like there won't be a big change when the new consoles arrive, but I don't think that will be the same in the future. We're really not that close to photorealism, but it's not just how realistic a single soldier looks. Big changes in the future might be when 1000s of soldiers/zombies/whatever are all modeled realistically, with realistic physics, and, most importantly, realistic AI. There's all kinds of stuff that more processing power would allow, that could have pretty drastic effects on gaming.

For example, imagine an RPG with the sort of language processing abilities of an advanced version of Watson. You could literally have a working converstaion with an NPC. Not just a list of four choices on screen, but you actually talk to them out loud and they understand you and respond realistically.

Another example is what we'd hoped GlassBox would deliver with SimCity. Think of the processing power to actually create a million agents who have specific jobs, houses, wants, and needs. An actual working city would be pretty amazing to play around with.

That type of processing power is always going to need more wattage and more cooling when it first rolls out, so I'd imagine there will still be a difference in the future between mobile and consoles/PCs.

See any PS2 quality games on your phone? No? That's why this doesn't matter.

true, but lightyears beside the point.

the ouya is just the first in generations of consoles using ultramobile or mobile soc's... heck even last years desktop gpu's are faster than next-years top console gpu's... not being as restricted by tdp & power easily doubles the chips performance.

why do you think an ouya costs $99? for ~$66 anyone could just hook up their smartphone to the tv via mhl while connecting a ps3/wii controller... paying $33 more for a curated console gaming ecosystem, plus having two devices? who can say no?

Sure, they're pushing nearly the same number of flops on the gpus. The CPUS are lagging *way* behind in terms of performance of current gen consoles.

yeah sure thats why the ps4 has 8 cores with about atom's performance... so effectively their in the same ballpark as the galaxy s4 A15 cores... true that has only four but hey nobody said this year's smartphones have more cpu processing power than next year's ps4...

why do you think an ouya costs $99? for ~$66 anyone could just hook up their smartphone to the tv via mhl while connecting a ps3/wii controller... paying $33 more for a curated console gaming ecosystem, plus having two devices? who can say no?

"Imagine when next year's model of the Ouya or Nvidia's own Project Shield are able to run 3D games at the level of Gears of War: Judgment or Uncharted 3 without breaking a sweat, for instance."

GoW or Uncharted run so well on the clunky (by today's standards) consoles for a reason. The developers have been optimizing the hell out of their code for these specific configurations. Try running any latest AAA 3D game on a custom-built PC with similar graphics card/processor/RAM combo and it will be obvious. My point is that I don't think there will be many developers who will be willing to optimize their games' code for the latest and greatest mobile chips considering the chips' 'shelf life'. This is one more reason raw power means bupkis when it comes to 3D games.

Sure, they're pushing nearly the same number of flops on the gpus. The CPUS are lagging *way* behind in terms of performance of current gen consoles.

yeah sure thats why the ps4 has 8 cores with about atom's performance... so effectively their in the same ballpark as the galaxy s4 A15 cores... true that has only four but hey nobody said this year's smartphones have more cpu processing power than next year's ps4...

I'm wondering what makes you think the cores in the PS4 CPU will be comparable in performance to an Atom. The PS4 CPU is supposedly based on AMD's Jaguar architecture, which succeeds Bobcat, which was already significantly faster than Atom. This is not even considering the fact that the PS4 will have about 20 times the memory bandwidth, and may even have dual GPU's (one on-die, off-chip GPU, one integrated IGP that can be used to offload certain CPU tasks). Last but not least, the 4x Cortex-A15 in the Galaxy S4 can probably only run full speed intermittently before having to scale back performance to prevent overheating, which is why it has 4x A7 to balance power draw.

In terms of raw processing power, I estimate the PS4 will be comparable to a midrange quad-core game PC, which means it will be at least 20 times faster than e.g. the chip in the Galaxy S4.

Want to impress me? Make it so your next high-end discreet desktop card runs on PCI-E bus power and doesn't require a leaf blower cooler.

It wouldn't be a high-end card if it didn't go to extremes.

You can get mid-range cards that will work without a fan, but even those will power cap (slow down) compared to the same hardware with active cooling.

But this is all missing the point. Previous generation console games were introduced with astonishing graphics that couldn't be matched by anything short of exotic workstations, and they kept an advantage until they were replaced. But that changed. For the past several years their ability has been easily surpassed by a cheap PCs with a mid-range GPU. The next generation of consoles will start as pretty much exactly the same chipset as a current mid-range PC, and presumably won't be updated for another eight years.

It's pretty easy to see that mobile chips will be matching the performance of consoles in just a year or two, and will be well ahead soon after. It's just like PC architecture replacing everything else in the data center. You don't need any imagination to see this, you just need to look at the performance curves. And believe that change happens. ("I can't see a businessman using a keyboard like a secretary.")

Lots of FLOPS are pointless if you don't have the memory bandwidth to go along with them. And on that front mobile has not nearly kept up with desktop. It eats a lot of power to talk with external DRAM.

Will a mobile ARM CPU really be able to match a 3 core 3.2GHz, 6 thread PPC. I'm not so sure. And if it does, what will that do to my battery?

The tl;dr is yes.

Xenon was (and is) not a particularly advanced CPU design. It's an in order, two issue CPU (comparable to an Intel Atom, actually), it's reasonably deeply pipelined, and it doesn't have particularly spectacular branch prediction. It's actually pretty high throughput for simple tasks (physics simulations, video decoding), but it doesn't handle more complicated code very well at all (think things like game logic and AI). This made a lot of sense at the time for the 360, but a lot of what Xenon was good at we now shift to the GPU (hardware video decode blocks are way more efficient than doing it on the CPU, for example).

At the same time, the new ARM cores are pretty capable - they are 3-issue, out of order designs that can do a lot more work per clock cycle. A quad core ARM15 based design that was running in the 1.5GHz-2.0GHz area could pretty easily keep pace with Xenon, and ought to fit in a tablet, if maybe not a cell phone. There are other things that will hold mobile devices back, of course (memory bandwidth is a good example), but the raw compute performance is certainly there.

Lots of FLOPS are pointless if you don't have the memory bandwidth to go along with them. And on that front mobile has not nearly kept up with desktop. It eats a lot of power to talk with external DRAM.

their talking about stacking dram directly on top of the gpu. undoubtedly will happen in 2 years time.

Lots of FLOPS are pointless if you don't have the memory bandwidth to go along with them. And on that front mobile has not nearly kept up with desktop. It eats a lot of power to talk with external DRAM.

their talking about stacking dram directly on top of the gpu. undoubtedly will happen in 2 years time.

While PoP DRAM requires less power to talk to than separately-packaged DRAM, it still external memory (it isn't on die). And desktop now has access to Hybrid Memory Cube, which promises orders of magnitude more bandwidth than you'll see on mobile for many years to come.

serious case of exaggeration. 80 GFLOPs for the Tegra 4 compared to the 240 GFLOPs for the GPU in the 360. that's not barely faster by any measure. and if in 2-3 years it finally does reach 240 GFLOPS, that'll be compared against a 10-11 year old platform.